Connecting bankers to vendors of products used by banks and bankers has been problematic. One typical solution has been the unsolicited or “cold” sales call, wherein a vendor telephones a banker not previously personally known to him. This method, however, tends not to be successful and often only annoys the banker.
Another solution to encourage banker and vendor interaction has been via traditional meeting places like conferences and trade shows. This is an extremely expensive and inefficient way to generate leads. Games are devised to push the vendors and bankers together, such as bingo cards that force the bankers to walk by booths and get stamps. This superficial interaction yields minimal results for the vendors.
Public online sharing sites promise to give vendors access to bankers who, theoretically, are sharing and revealing their needs to each other through discussion forums. But the presence of the vendors causes the bankers to stop sharing their needs with each other, or leave the sharing site altogether, because the bankers do not want the unsolicited sales calls. Further, the open nature of social media platforms causes the bankers to either not share, or to simply leave the site altogether, thus leaving very little real community behavior for the vendor to act on or learn from.